TracingWoodgrains
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User ID: 103
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
while it is true that speakers of tonal languages are substantially more likely to exhibit AP, even among musically trained children it's not really an "almost everyone" thing
I do think it’s worth emphasizing the difference between “musically trained children” and “children trained in absolute pitch.” It’s a specific skill related to musicality but neither fully contained within it nor necessary for it; knowing that children receive musical training says relatively little about their specific pitch training.
It’s possible that I’m stating it too strongly! It’s an understudied, underutilized training process, since people have broadly treated it as a mysterious divine gift rather than a specific, trained skill. I think the most precise statement would be “far more people than generally acknowledged can develop absolute pitch during early childhood with relatively low effort.” But mostly I just think people should move from completely ignoring it to studying it enough that we know how prevalent it can be.
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
Why would I? That tension between his present and his past, and my conflicted thoughts about it, is core to the reason we thought it would be interesting to do a podcast in the first place. We chatted in advance as well and covered some of the same ground; he came in fully aware that it could get combative and was not just amenable to that approach but actively interested in it. Masking my own sentiment towards the alt-right would be a disservice both to him and to listeners. When we moved past that part, I went back to engaging in a milder, more deliberate way, but both have their place.
Walt doesn't praise Hitler, but analogies are just that: analogies. I absolutely would push soft democratic socialists who had histories full of guillotine memes and so forth on those topics in very much the same tone I was pushing Walt. In his own writing, he makes the explicit comparison between himself and liberals who had communist phases, so it's worth exploring that comparison on its own terms.
TracingWoodgrains
2mo ago
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
Now featuring a semi-interactive version of the quiz itself.
Thanks for posting this here, by the way! I've, uh, had my hands full with a few things.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
Thanks! I’ll see what I wind up doing—I don’t think taking time off school is necessary, but I was definitely more than a little distracted in class today. I figure I’ll see who reaches out to me about what, if anything.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
I think the two are inherently connected in important ways—that a world where people share more of Singer’s ideals is one where they share more of his behavior as well. For an ethicist, their life is and must be their message. We all know about the sexual misadventures of Mohammed and Joseph Smith. Secular ethicists, too, must be judged by more than simply their abstract ideas.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
Than virtue ethics, deontology, or contractualism? Yes. I am not claiming they are more likely than people who do not actively aim towards upholding high, clearly articulated ethical standards, but yes, I assert that moral systems have measurable impacts on people’s behavior in important ways, and the safeguards against cheating within utilitarianism—and particularly, by Singer’s own explicit admission, in his brand of it—are straightforwardly less than those in other ethical systems.
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
There are absolutely competent people within it, inasmuch as there are people within it at all. The issue I'm pointing to is one of raw numbers, not one of competence.
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
I agree with the rest of your post, but it's myopic to say that these institutions are overwhelmingly progressive "because progressives showed up." It is absolutely not a stretch of the word "elite" to wonder why all the twenty-somethings going to law school all share these same ideological premises. They all grew up with a similar curriculum, a similar Grand Narrative of history, watching the same movies, receiving the same cultural signals. And you've already explained how the institution is self-reinforcing, so there's just not a lot of room in your own framing for conservatives to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and capture institutions by attending law school.
That's another layer up from the question of who's showing up. Yes, there's a reason all young, educated professionals share the same ideological premises, and yes, that reason is worth exploring. A lot of my answer basically looks like "progressives showed up" another layer up—that curriculum, those cultural signals, that Grand Narrative is what the people who prioritized making curricula and sending cultural signals and forming a Grand Narrative believe. Culture isn't infinitely malleable, but it doesn't just happen. The project of framework-building falls to those who take it seriously, and there's no law decreeing that good ideas will win out over bad ones. It's a power game many layers deep that every movement in history has played, and conservatives are on the outside of culture looking in at the moment because they lost the cultural power game at least a generation ago, and in some regards much longer, without realizing it.
TracingWoodgrains
8mo ago
Yeah, I'm working on an article about it, but this is the most thorough account I think I've given so far. Copied for convenience:
Different people have different reactions to strict religious environments. I was a serious, religiously scrupulous kid who took my faith's commandments very seriously. I was also always a bit odd. Mormons have a strict prohibition against pornography, unmarried sex, or dating before 16 years old, something that extends to generally strict modesty standards and instructions not to look on women with lust more broadly.
I internalized those standards and, so far as I can tell, developed an instinctive disgust/irritation reaction to seeing women in any sort of immodest or 'sexy' settings: bikinis, billboard models, sex scenes or kissing in movies—everything intended to arouse, even tame stuff, was something to grimace and look away from. No dating, no relationships, no sex? Fine by me. I'd shove all that stuff into a corner and deal with it when I was an adult or something. This extended for me even to things like crude sex jokes from other guys, which bothered me in particular when they came from other Mormons—didn't they care? I valued modesty and chastity and was scrupulous in those values. Sexual things were threats and temptations. Noticing them with anything other than disgust was a personal failing.
But, well, I was still an adolescent boy, and hormones don't simply disappear when ignored. I took my faith's prohibitions seriously and rarely dug where I wasn't supposed to, but seem to have sublimated my romantic feelings into an interest in something safely outside the realm of the real. At some point, I wandered onto deviantArt, where I found a few extraordinary artists who portrayed the world of anthro animals in compelling, beautiful ways—see here or here for (safe) examples—and without being able to articulate why I was so fascinated by that world or was paying so close of attention to it, began to follow their work with interest. I've always loved nature and the sense of wildness; the artists I found excelled at capturing emotions close to my heart. Art (and I do mean art here, not as a euphemism) became a non-threatening, meaningful outlet for me to explore the idea of romance disconnected from the baggage, cruft, and uncertainty around a real world where I had internalized that I should clamp down on all feelings in that domain.
I'm not convinced that people are born with immutable romantic interests, but I am convinced that past adolescence, some stay more-or-less fixed. In my case, a strict upbringing that I took seriously, combined with the need for some sort of outlet and an insistence on staying glued to the computer when possible, meant that my own oddness was channeled and focused during a sensitive development period towards a deep-running interest in and appreciation for anthropomorphism, along with a conviction that I was asexual. I'm quite sure at this point that the interest is immutable, and I wouldn't change it—I remain mostly detached from the furry fandom for many obvious reasons, but I continue to love the impossible world I was so drawn to in adolescence, for all the same reasons.
I kept telling myself that romance would come later, that crushes and noticing interest in people and all the rest would be right around the corner, but as I got older and it kept not happening I started to seriously ask myself whether I was capable of being in love. In my early twenties, after I stepped away from Mormonism and let myself examine questions of romance in any way connected to the real without flinching away, I finally noticed a sense of romantic interest in people—men, that is—and was thoroughly relieved to learn I was normal enough to be able to fall in love. So then I started dating, met my now-husband, and lived happily ever after. The end.
In short, I see my interest as a sublimation of religious scrupulosity towards all things sexual, the result of being an odd person who took a strict environment seriously while having open access to outlets that eventually swept my pre-existing tendencies into a specific, peculiar cultural niche. I like to tell people, because I think it's true, that five hundred years ago I would have been a monk. But I grew up in the early 2000s, so I became a gay furry instead.
So it goes.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
It's the same set of 4 charts I embed towards the top of my article, showing the relative rankings of students of different races on academic, extracurricular, personal, and overall axes.
TracingWoodgrains
4hr ago
Very kind of you—I appreciate it.
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
Not really something I have the bandwidth for atm, unfortunately, but I'm happy to provide the questions as a base template for anyone wanting to run it again.
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
What are you talking about here? Last time I recall mentioning systems on Twitter it was to marvel at the way some people take the whole thing seriously.
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
That's the pipeline for you. I was surprised it went quite that far, but it's a good story!
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
While I maintain my reservations, I also generally enjoy the company of the people here and have nothing to hide in terms of associations. In this case, I was referring to his original posts and to Substack, as @FirmWeird accurately noted. I'm mostly just too distractable to post to multiple platforms simultaneously with any regularity, and yeah, Twitter is in a bit of a golden age for Mottelike effortposts atm, so I've been enjoying my time there.
I freely admit association with the Motte as appropriate. This place was a big part of my own intellectual journey and I have nothing to hide about it. In this case, Twitter throttles Substack links as if they're ads, so I couldn't link the Vitalist's blog without my posts getting throttled into oblivion. I even mention my connection in the replies to that post.
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence.
This is healthy for me to hear. He and I had a falling out some time back, and I admit it's colored my impression of things; I'm glad to have such a clear reminder of what he could bring to the table at his best to balance against my own sentiment.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
I appreciate the apology. I have always been upfront about precisely who I am.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
In the Google Drive folder, I shout at people to install RECAP. I went with the first guy who had PACER access, a stranger to me, trying to get into the story as quickly as possible.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
I don’t think it works to treat that passage as not specifically about sex when he emphasizes it is why he will not bother to address sexual ethics. What does Singer think about sexual ethics? That. That is the core of it.
I don’t precisely disagree that utilitarians, in their daily lives, are conscious of duty to the near. I disagree that they have a philosophical justification for it that amounts to more than just stapling the same instinct all people feel onto their framework. More, I disagree that their advocacy for increased duty-to-the-far can or claims to come without tradeoffs. Attention is limited, and utilitarian arguments—Singer’s in particular—constantly focus on the need to assign less of it to the near and more of it to the distant.
So—yes, in their daily lives, they have friends and family members, and yes, when pressed, they come up with utilitarian-sounding justifications for it. But that, I argue, is a second- or third-order kludge to reconcile human instinct with a moral system that does not inherently account for it or treat it as relevant.
I expect people to have insightful comments on every domain of behavior they claim authority over. Singer claims authority over all of ethics and should be held to that standard.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
Sure. Of the things I listed, I think lying to your affair partner is rather less significant than most other parts of the story—I just wanted to establish that it was one of the points demonstrated by the email.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
Ah—I have no idea whether he explicitly said such a thing and would be quite startled if he did. From my angle, the fact of an affair and concurrent/subsequent collaborative work are already sufficient to establish a degree of fairly serious misconduct, where the spectres of professional reward and punishment inevitably loom given the power dynamics in play.
I'm prepared to bite whatever bullet is here and say "those who read it and interpret it differently are wrong." It's a useful phrase with a clearly defined meaning. I use it as appropriate and if someone overinterprets it I'll correct them. I'm looking to describe a set of events that happen sometimes, not encourage overreaction.
I would say "You're welcome to suggest another phrase for the process of deliberate removal of a group of people from an area by any means necessary," but that feels silly. We have a phrase for that. It's ethnic cleansing. We don't need another. If people are overstating it or overinterpreting it, they should knock it off, since the word "genocide" already exists for that purpose.
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